Reading Women Writing

Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture

Françoise Lionnet

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501723117
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour les femmes auteures

Adopting a boldly innovative approach to women's autobiographical writing, Françoise Lionnet here examines the rhetoric of self-portraiture in works by authors who are bilingual or multilingual or of mixed races or cultures. Autobiographical Voices offers incisive readings of texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Marie Cardinal, Maryse Condé, Marie-Thérèse Humbert, Augustine, and Nietzsche.

Part I

Rereading the Past

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

This first section of the book will undertake a close reading of the Confessions, followed by an analysis of Ecce Homo. Its aim is to disclose some of the contradictions present both in the language of these autobiographies and in the critical reception they have elicited. In the case of Augustine, I am especially interested in showing that the dichotomy made by traditional criticism between form and content, artistic method and theological pronouncements, results in some misleading statements about the structural unity of the work. In a wonderfully clear and perceptive chapter of his Augustine of Hippo, Peter Brown, for example, defines book 10 of the Confessions as “the self-portrait of a convalescent,” engaged in a meditation on the mystery of man’s inner world, the sheer size of which was for him “a source of anxiety quite as much as of strength.” Yet Brown avoids dealing with books 11–13 altogether and resorts to spatial metaphors that are very much in the spirit of Augustine’s own prose but can hardly help clarify the function of a substantial part of the work (one-fourth of the whole, to be specific). Brown writes: “The remaining three books of the Confessions are a fitting ending to the self-revelation of such a man: like soft light creeping back over a rain-soaked landscape, the hard refrain of ‘Command’—’Command what You wish’—gives way to ‘Give’—’Give what I love: for I do love it.’” Augustine’s progress in self-awareness, his “therapy of self-examination,” as Brown puts it, does underscore a gradual movement from initial refusal or denial to greater acceptance of the word of God.¹ As Chapter 1 will argue, this movement is evident in the structure of the work itself. Analyzing this structure will bring into focus the nature of the reading process as it appears to be encoded within some sections of the Confessions, permitting certain conclusions about Augustine’s act of (self-)reading and illuminating the subtle process whereby “woman” comes to represent to Augustine an aspect of the self which must be effaced, erased, obliterated, because it is none other than the “sinning self.” Interestingly for us here, at the same time as he is discovering that “woman” must be evacuated from the “converted self,” Augustine is attributing to God the kind of receptive, nurturing, maternal, and nonauthoritarian qualities normally coded as feminine in Western culture. Augustine’s perception of God moves from that of an authoritarian figure who can “Command” him to that of a more generous one who will “Give.” In his relationship with the transcendent Other, Augustine moves from an oppositional stance to a deferring and accepting one. As we shall see in Part II, this is a trajectory that will have to be reversed in the case of women writers. They must first learn to reject a tradition of passive acceptance of the other before they can become the agents of their own discourses, the subjects of their own histories. Meanwhile, they will also incorporate into their stories a radical rereading of the tradition they implicitly aim to transform.

For both Augustine and Nietzsche, life and literature are very closely related, but whereas Augustine must transcend his narrative impulse to accede to eternal life, to become the reader of God’s word, Nietzsche sees narrative as the redemption of the past and his self as the sum of his literary output. Augustine is always writing toward (that is, loving) his ideal, transcendental Other—God. By contrast, Nietzsche sees himself as his own ideal reader: “Und so erzähle ich mir mein Leben [And so I tell my life to myself],” as he will proclaim in Ecce Homo.² This is the kind of grand solipsistic and tautological gesture of which Nietzsche is fond. He thereby refuses to allow for any possibility of domestication or appropriation of his words by an other. This attitude points to a form of “reaction” which, as will be seen, remains importantly dependent upon the Christian mentality it seeks to undermine. Nietzsche will denounce Christian self-abnegation while using all sorts of false doubles and adopting doppelgänger roles that simultaneously affirm and condemn the principles he puts forward. His symbolic use of women’s procreative powers stems from what Margot Norris has called “Nietzsche’s biocentric premises,” his conviction that animal vigor, the realm of the biological, is the only “real.” In their creatural role as biological mothers, women are opposed to “cultural man,” who is but a pretext, a means, for women’s instinctual drive to give birth. Culture, for Nietzsche, is engendered by an imaginary lack that provokes a mimetic response, an identification with the other. Maryse Condé’s representation of the impasse of mimetic identifications can be profitably studied as a dramatic portrayal of the cultural dead ends resulting from such an imaginary lack. As Norris argues, for Nietzsche, “mimesis acquires a negative value as inimical to the animal’s power and to the body’s life.”³

Nietzsche’s critique of the fundamental alienation involved in any kind of imitative cultural behavior thus yields the basis for the examination in Part II of the ambivalence that mētis women writers feel toward their variously conflicting colonial heritages. It is by returning to the physicality of their experiences, to the racial and sexual characteristics of their bodies, that these women become able to create culture as well. In essence, they ground culture in the body, thus erasing the traditional distinctions between culture and nature, the life of the mind and that of the body. They thus implicitly adopt the Nietzschean principle underscoring the experiential and performative aspects of literature: self-writing becomes self-invention.

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¹Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 177–81.

²Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: A. Kroner, 1964), 8:299; On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), p. 221.

³Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 5, and see pp. 53–100 especially.

1

Augustine’s Confessions: Poetics of Harmony, or the Ideal Reader in the Text

Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence

Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality“

Toward the end of the Confessions (13:30, 31), Augustine makes a last reference to the Manichean doctrines he had espoused during his youth. From the vantage point of a now-acknowledged total dependence on the word of God, his youthful errors are dismissed as the blind ignorance and insane claims of a man not yet illuminated by the power of the word and the proper understanding of God’s truth, the source of all harmony (“concordiam” [12:30]) and beauty. The Manicheans, those he calls insani, or “madmen,” taught a form of materialistic dualism in the belief that good and evil (or light and darkness) were two separate substances, always in conflict. According to this doctrine, the creation of the world was the product of those conflicting forces, and the souls of men consisted of an element of light imprisoned in darkness. As Augustine makes clear in 13:30, Manicheans see God himself as subjected to determinism. God is not a free creator, since he was “compelled by necessity” to assemble the different parts of the universe, such as those had been created “elsewhere.” The vocabulary used by Augustine in this very short chapter (sixteen lines) is of particular interest to the textual approach I shall be using here:

Opera tua, et multa eorum dicunt te fecisse necessitate conpulsum, sicut fabricas caelorum et conpositiones siderum, et hoc non de tuo, sed iam fuisse alibi creata et aliunde, quae tu contraheres et conpaginares atque contexeres, cum de hostibus victis mundana moenia molineris.

[They say that you were compelled by necessity to make many of your works, such as the structure of the heavens and the ordering of the stars; that you did not use your own materials but those which had already been made elsewhere, and that you merely assembled them, pieced them together and wove them into one, and that you erected a protective rampart made up of your defeated enemies.] [13:30; my italics]¹

Because of their belief in dualism, Manicheans cannot accept that the world, like God’s book, is a harmonious creation. They see its textual fabric as a mere collection of borrowed elements hastily sewn together in order to create a frame, a rampart for protection against darkness and evil. Their views exemplify the need to compartmentalize, separate, and hierarchize reality, a need reenacted again and again throughout history by writers and philosophers intent on defining and classifying the polarities constitutive of Western culture: good/evil, light/darkness, male/female, and so on. In the Confessions, however, such a belief in dualism becomes unacceptable to Augustine the convert. For him, all of God’s creation is good and beautiful as Genesis 1 asserts: “And you saw all that you made, O God, and found it very good.” The last chapters of book 13 (32–38) go on to proclaim the glory of God’s deeds, which reflect both his wholeness and his holiness. The fundamental Manichean conflict between the forces of good and evil is thus transcended by Augustine’s adoption of a Neoplatonic Christian theology of unity and oneness.

As I show later in this chapter, the effacement of rigid boundaries leads Augustine to the progressive transformation and assimilation of what might be termed the feminine elements of his North African Roman Catholic culture. By integrating into one harmonious whole all the oppositional monads defined by Manicheanism, Augustine valorizes both of the opposing terms, making it possible to eschew the binary, exclusionary logic of rational thinking in favor of a more relational view of the world. It is such a relational view that subtends Augustine’s structuring of his autobiography, foreshadowing the patterns of métissage in the writing of contemporary women authors. It is thus extremely appropriate to begin my book with a detailed analysis of the Confessions, this founding document of Western autobiographical discourse, and to attempt to reread it in light of my own contemporary feminist commitment to eliminating the artificial boundaries that centuries of Manichean—indeed, phallogo-centric—thinking have helped to erect. I need not rehearse here the Derridean critique of metaphysics, but let me simply state that my approach to Augustine seeks to free the Confessions from the philosophical and theological traditions that have appropriated it.

In dealing with the Confessions, a text doubly canonical in virtue of its literary qualities and theological statements, critics have generally been tempted either to focus on its status as architexte of Western autobiography and thus paradigm of a certain narrative mode and historical itinerary or to see it as doctrinal supplement to the larger body of Augustinian writings, which belong to a specific philosophical tradition based on Neoplatonic Christianity and Judaic exegesis.² Indeed, much Augustine criticism has tended to divide along those lines: secular reading of the narrative part, the first nine books, or philosophical/theological interpretation of the sacred doctrine using the rhetorical meditations of the last four books to clarify Augustine’s notions of time, memory, origins, and beginnings.

Yet, if Augustine takes such pains to insist that God’s text, the universe, is a harmonious whole, then I would like to suggest that Augustine’s own text must have been structured so as to conform to similar standards of unity, goodness, and harmony. Why then the combination of nine narrative books (1–9) with one meditative section (10) and three exegetic books (11–13)? This question has perplexed, even troubled, all those who have tried to deal with the text. The structural unity of the work has been a subject of controversy for many critics and some editions of the Confessions even omit completely the last four books on the ground that “they do not form an integral part of the biography.”³

It is certainly difficult for the modern reader to cope with the sudden shift in emphasis which occurs in book 10. The narrative collapses, human historical time gives way to a non-temporal, nonlinear meditation on the nature of memory (book 10) and time (book 11), and to an exegesis of the first verses of Genesis 1 (books 11–13). This seemingly didactic aspect of the four “episcopal” books⁴ easily leads the secular reader to reject them as doctrinal supplement and therefore not relevant to students of autobiographical narratives. One recent study by William S. Spengemann goes so far as to claim that “correlative changes in the form and doctrine of The Confessions do not permit us to see the three parts as elements in a single preconceived structure” and asserts that there is a “fundamenta...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction: The Politics and Aesthetics of Métissage
• Part I Rereading the Past
• Part II Creating a Tradition
• Conclusion
• Index